How Exceptional IS Classical's Woman Problem? Pt. 1

At first glance, it seems obvious that classical music is unusual among the arts in its degree of male dominance. But a careful look suggests that its gender balance is far from exceptional.

NPR’s Anastasia Tsioulcas just wrote a scathingly brilliant post about the “fat-shaming” of the gifted Irish mezzo Tara Erraughtby a plague of British critics, who sounded like teenage boys as they dissed not Erraught's singing but the supposed flaws of her body. Last year, Tsioulcas thoughtfully chronicled some notorious “outbursts against female conductors." She now says that all of this “honestly makes me wonder if classical music doesn't deserve its stereotype of being silly, reactionary, outdated and out of step with the contemporary world.” I share her views on both fat-shaming and gender balance: we should try never to judge people by their looks, and it is an embarrassment for the conducting profession that not even one woman is in its top tier. But, I wondered: at least in the arts, just how much more advanced is the rest of the "contemporary world?"

I'd have expected the answer to be "much better," since issues of gender balance run deep in classical music. This art form, after all, centers on a repertory of classics written in the 18th and 19th centuries, when women had absurdly limited chances to develop composing careers. So I was more surprised than I should have been when I looked at other contemporary arts and saw how off-kilter they can be. For example:

Call me George: the woman who wrote Middlemarch.

Literature and writing: By the mid-1870s (when men were dominating classical music), Emily Dickinson had written most of her unique, unsurpassed poetry and Mary Anne Evans had published the greatest novel in the English language (using the male nom-de-plume George Eliot). Given such precedent, it amazed me that in leading literary journals today, women make up only 20-35% of the writers published or reviewed. That's according to Vida Count, which keeps statistics. And to stray outside the arts, 63% of the bylines this year in America's top 10 newspapers are male, as are all but one of this year's individual winners of a Pulitzer Prize in journalism.

Film Acting: I assumed there would be balance in front of the cameras; after all, women slightly outnumber men in real life, so you'd expect movie characters to show the same ratio. But remarkably, the top 100 movies have about two-and-a-half men for every female character. And do I even need to make the case that actresses have it worse than just about any other artists when it comes to being judged primarily for their looks? (If you do want evidence, try that Annenberg study.)

Jazz: DownBeat magazine’s Hall of Fame includes 126 artists, but only seven are women - about 5.5%.

Pop: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has inducted 304 soloists or acts—but only 37 (about 12%) include any women at all. To be sure, that hall is focused on the past, and women are now better represented in pop: Ludovic Hunter-Tilney reports in the Financial Times that in the UK in 2012, the top-selling records “were evenly split between female and male solo acts, each accounting for about 30 per cent of total sales (groups made up the rest). Women also appeared on more than half the 40 top-selling singles.” Yet on the other hand, he notes, “the gender ratio goes badly awry behind the scenes" - only 13% of UK songwriters are female. And we need to make further qualifications. For one thing, some of the major pop genres are heavily male-dominated, like hip-hop and country - the Country Music Hall of Fame is 83.5% male, and country's big Stagecoach Festival was 75% male this year. More to the point of the Irish mezzo dissed for her shape, judgments based on looks permeate pop music. Martha Gill argues that "pop music is dominated by women cashing in on their sexuality." She and James Reed and Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls argue that these women have full agency in said cashing-in, but Sinead O'Connor famously dissented about its being "in ANY way an empowerment" (and said, "Nothing but harm will come in the long run"). And classical-pop crossover singer Charlotte Church disagrees about the claim of agency, based on her career experience. In a BBC talk, Church begins by asking us to picture Beyonce’s "husband Jay-Z stripped down to a T-back bikini thong, sex kittin’ his way through a boulevard of suited-and-booted women for their pleasure..." After other imaginary examples, she says, “When I was 19 or 20, I found myself in this position, being pressured into wearing more and more revealing outfits. And the lines I had spit at me again and again, generally by middle-aged men, were ‘you look great, you’ve got a great body, why not show it off?’” Here is her complete talk:

Happily, we're seeing an explosion of great women singer-songwriters who prefer not to be "cashing in on their sexuality" and have the leverage not to let others push them to (today's headline - with a strong-language advisory-involves a series of tweets from Neko Case, one of which uses "Peggy Olson" as a verb for what she will not let the media do to her). Still, my point remains: while classical music needs to do better, its gender issues are neither as unusual nor as anachronistic as we might think.

Considering those halls of fame, by the way, leads me to a thesis about that mostly male classical pantheon. We saw how overwhelming the Halls of Fame are boy's clubs - including those of Country (83% male), Rock (88% male), Blues (89% males) and Jazz (94% male). What these ratios tell us is thatwhenever a musical genre has a "canon" (a repertory of classics - which, in the non-classical fields, are mostly recordings) and a pantheon of greats of the past (in the non-classical cases, often hall-of-famers), they tend to come from eras when men were privileged and women were discouraged. Older classical concert halls sometimes display busts of the immortals, and they are always male - but that might well also be the case if popular genres also had statue-themed performance spaces.

When a musical genre has a "canon" (a core repertory of classics - usually recordings in jazz, rock, and to some degree country, and printed scores in classical) and a pantheon of great artists of the past, they tend to come from eras when men dominated and women were dis-empowered.

But I don't think that is anywhere near as true of our current time and place. American classical's new-music scene is more vital right now than at any time I can remember, and women who compose are as much as part of the reason as men. In a future post,I hope to explorethe possibility that future historians will see major advances towards gender parity in composing during our decade.

Also, in the future I hope to discuss conducting, the highest-status classical performance role. For now, a broad point:

Some arts can be practiced solo, like piano-playing; others require the coordination of a a large number of performers, as in film or in opera or orchestral performance. In the latter arts, we usually find a hierarchy dominated by one or two powerful people. These people have usually been men, not only in classical music but also in film and other arts.

The film world is starting to open up to women directors and producers, but my sense is that the conducting world is opening up faster. Some women are poised to reach the pinnacle - e.g., Marin Alsop, Susanna Malkki, and Simone Young - and many more are on their way:WQXR lists fiveon the rise, and Jessica Duchen helpfully lists over 100women conductors. My point, again, is not that things are just fine, but that it's conceivable that classical conducting will attain gender parity before either the Cannes Festival or the Academy Awards will in nominations for Best Director.

It is conceivable that classical conducting will achieve gender parity before the Academy Awards and Cannes Festival will in their best-director nominations.

Here's one more cheer for classical music: if we want to know what gender parity would look like in the real world, we can already see it in one major classical arena - and thinking about that field tells us interesting things about gender. Stay tuned - I'll go into that in Pt. II. of this post.